There was a strange moment of stillness as Scott McKenner battled raining embers to save his Tathra home.
McKenner was standing outside, garden hose in hand, as the fire front raced towards the sleepy seaside village on the New South Wales far south coast.
His wife and five-year-old boy had been sent to the safety of Bega, further inland, where hundreds of anxious locals waited for the firestorm to pass.
The embers were just starting to fall, when, for a split second, McKenner was enveloped in complete darkness.
“It just went dark and I couldn’t see my hands,” he told Guardian Australia. “Then all of a sudden it was just a wall of leaves – leaves on fire – just coming through.
“I thought ‘I’m in trouble here’. I hid around the house and waited for that to go through.”
He likened the sound of the fire to a train, roaring right past his back wall. His windows buckled with the stress, bending inward and imploding. Somehow, his home survived.
McKenner, like many who stayed rather than evacuate to the nearby Bega, was starting to pick up the pieces on Monday when Guardian Australia encountered him, checking on the homes of friends and neighbours who fled.
At last count, 100 homes, cabins and caravans, and other buildings have been lost in Sunday’s inferno. That number was expected to rise.
Thankfully, there was still no report of serious injury or death on Monday night.
Malcolm Turnbull and Gladys Berejiklian, the NSW premier, both surveyed the scene.
There has been criticism of the failure of text alerts to local residents, and some residents have said they were only warned by a knock on the door.
The phone system is notoriously bad in Tathra, and the fire has exposed potential problems with smartphone-based alert systems.
Berejiklian defended the alerts while speaking at the RFS briefing centre in Bega. There were also radio alerts and calls to landlines.
“I’m confident that every effort was made to tell people at the right time,” she said.
The Rural Fire Service commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, said the sheer speed of the fire was shocking as it raged through several kilometres of bushland towards the small seaside town of Tathra.
Fitzsimmons spoke to Guardian Australia as he surveyed a scene of twisted metal and charcoal brick in the town on Monday morning.
The fire had came close to missing Tathra altogether, he said, but a sudden wind gust sent the fire front towards the town, along with “raining embers”.
Despite the difficulties, the efforts of firefighters had saved some 398 homes, he said.
“The fact that we’re not talking about deaths, life threatening injuries, it’s a credit to the firefighters, it’s a credit to the managers, and it’s a credit to the community, who were prepared and responded well,” Fitzsimmons said.
The fire crept over a ridge at the town’s north-western fringes. When it did so, Bronwyn Morris could see it from her home.
She wasted no time. Morris got her husband and dog, Pippa, and fled to the beach.
From there, she watched on as helicopters water picked up a load from the ocean behind her and carried it back toward the flames.
In the distance, she could hear gas bottles exploding.
When she finally made her way back home, she did so to find it had survived, but only just. The fire had come within metres of her home. The bushland directly behind her was a large expanse of black, still smouldering in isolated pockets.
The home next to her, inhabited by an ageing woman, was completely destroyed.
Further up the street, multiple homes were flattened.
“The way that it just came through and jumped over the house, and got the house behind that. I just can’t believe it,’ Morris told Guardian Australia.
